Usability Issues at Daily Work with OpenOffice.org

I'm working with (and spreading the word about) OpenOffice.org at work and found some issues that make it harder to work with the applications as it should be. I talked with Frank Loehmann from the User Experience Team a few times - thank you for your sympathetic ear, Frank! Also I reported most of the issues at IssueZilla. I hope this wiki page will call more attention to these issues and maybe some developers will fix it in the future.

If you also are affected by an issue mentioned here, please vote for it! Go to the issue page, log in and click at "Vote for this issue". Go to the issue in your "Show votes" page, enter "1" in the votes column and click "Submit" at the bottom of the page. Thanks for your vote!

PS: "Serious" means that this issue breaks or disrupts the normal user workflow.

Some Serious Usability Issues in Detail

It's very common that people want to edit images that they fit into the page structure. My collegues do that every day (with MS Word). Copying the image into Draw, cropping it, and copying it back to Writer is not a solution! The solution in Draw should be available in Writer too. I read in the Issue that OD is working on that maybe for OOo 3.2.

The current behavior of moving/copying one cell using the mouse is not intuitive (click on a cell, hold the mouse button and move the cursor to another cell, go back to the first cell and loose the mouse button; then move the cell to another position in the sheet). Some people said that patents hold back the implementation of a solution for this issue. Is there no workaround for this patent(s) possible?

At the moment, to edit a long document while referring to another part of the same document which is in another page can only be done through opening another Windows. This is less than satisfactory. A split screen is needed for efficiency and usability. This issue received 160+ votes and yet not implemented since version 1.

Issue 42120 Show quantity of selected cells in the "Name Box" of the Formula Bar AKA number of rows and columns showed for selections (application: Calc)

There is no information in Calc how many rows and columns are selected. For example, if you have selected cells A4:A31 it would be useful to show the number of selected cells: 28. So you must not count manually.

Suggestion:
Extend the "Name Box" of the Formula Bar with quantity information when more than one cell is selected. If the cells A4:A31 are selected, the Name Box should show "A4:A31 (28)". If the cells B4:E31 are selected, the Name Box should show "B4:E31 (28x4)".

Quantity of selected cells in the "Name Box" of the Formula Bar in a competitor program (German version)

If you use the "Find & Replace" dialog and if you select an item of "More Options" (backwards, regular expressions, etc.), next time you open the "F&R" dialog the "More Options" part will be not shown - but the item will be still selected.

It is not visible to the user that the "More Options" item is still selected, so it can (and will) be forgotten. Therefore the user can't find what s/he wants and doesn't know why.

Suggestion:
When opening the "Find & Replace" dialog, keep the whole dialog open as long as an item of the "More Options" part is selected.

Issue 93938 Calc loses selected range in a sheet when going to another sheet (application: Calc)

When you have two sheets in a spreadsheet document and

you select a range of cells (e.g. A1:B3) in sheet 1 and

then you are going to sheet 2 and

back to sheet 1,

the selected cell range is lost and only the last selected cell of the range (B3) is selected.

Expected:
The selected range shouldn't be lost. There are a plenty of use cases where you need to look to another sheet during an operation with selected cell ranges in the first sheet.

For example, it is annoying to lose the selection of dozens of cells in sheet 1 only because you have to varify the selection with information in sheet 2 - before you have finished the selection and before you have executed an operation, e.g. deleting or cell formatting.

In a Calc sheet, I have columns with 2 different widths. Each column has a picture (anchored to the cell), either a wide or a strait one. If I delete a wide column with its picture and then I copy a small column and insert this into the empty wide column, the width of the column will be corrected. Because of the copied strait column, the wide column become strait too. So far, so good.

But the picture of the wide column and all following columns won't be repositioned to the right new position. I will attach a picture to demonstrate what I mean. Now, you have to correct the position of the pictures manually and that's not satisfying.

Expected behavior:
Inserting a column with different width as the existing column should reposition all following pictures so that the distance to their cell borders will be the same as before. The difference of the width between the wide and the strait column should also be applied to the picture.

If you have several headings with the same paragraph background color, then the space between the headings will be filled with the paragraph background color of these headings.

See A) in the attached picture with 2 headings (level 2+3).

This bug doesn't occur when inserting a new paragraph in another style (e.g. Default - see B) in the picture) or after changing the background color of one heading (see C) in the picture). Why is the "spacing" not filled when the paragraphs has different colors? This is definitely a bug and not a feature. It looks not "right".

The first numbered list of a document doesn't keep "Restart Numbering" after reopening if it was set with right-click and context menu only. It only keeps the setting using "Paragraph... > Outline & Numbering > Numbering" with "Restart at this paragraph" and "Start with 1".

Normally it is not necessary that this setting is preserved for the first numbered list in a document. But:

If this document is part of a Master Document, then the false setting results in confusing/false numbering if you don't use the (more complicated) paragraph dialog.

User setting should always be preserved after saving the document - and not get lost.

MRU->OD: a "Restart numbering" on the first paragraph of a list will only be saved when a new "start with" number has been assigned. This can be of interest for Master-/Sub-documents using list styles and outlines.

As ES summarized: "the goal here is to get a table formatted with rows alterning
their colors throughout the table AND including the last row."

Most times I don't need a sum row. The problem now is that you can not configure the Autoformat feature not to insert a "sum row" color in the last row of the table. In a table with e.g. 6 rows (1 header row, 5 content rows) the last 2 rows get the same color but I don't want this.

It should be possible

to save a table color sheme without a sum (or/and header) row in Autoformat and

to assign a table color sheme to an existing table without a sum (or/and header) row - the simplest way would be checkboxes in the area of additional formattings (in German you can open this with click at "Zusätze" in the Autoformat window).

Table formatting should alternate the colors of its rows throughout the table AND should include the last row (as an option). This picture shows the actual imperfect behavior in the last 2 rows.

Some Non-serious Usability Issues in Detail

Issue 88716 Page Up and Page Down doesn't scroll a full page the first time (application: Writer)

Scrolling up and down with the button Page Up or Page Down works only the half
way in the first time. Any further Page Up and Page Down correctly scrolls a
whole page.

This issue occurs in Writer when viewing with (more or less) 100% zoom factor or
when viewing an entire page and then clicking Page Up or Page Down. Only the
normal view is affected, not the page preview.

It's annoying to have the half first and the half second page at screen and to
adjust that manually to see a full next page.

Suggestion:
Page Up or Page Down should ensure full page scrolling instead of half page
scrolling (always).

CLOTH: confirming - the view shifts because the page up/down moves the cursor, and he
page is displayed as if you would move the cursor one page up/down.

If you only care about moving the view, you can use the page up/down button in
the navigator (either the buttons in the mini-navigator, the ones at the bottom
of the vertical scrollbar), or the controls in the big navigator.

Page Up and Page Down doesn't scroll a full page the first time

Issue 97364 Page numbering should not be touched from paragraph style in Indexes (application: Writer)

If the paragraph style of an Index (e.g. Contents 1-10) is capitalized, then the page numbers become capitalized too. See attached picture.

The new scaling factor slider in Calc page preview is very handy but lacks
displaying the current scaling factor as a number. If you want to know the
concrete scaling factor you have to go to Format Page > Sheet > Scale > Scaling
Factor.

The zoom factor is shown next to the zoom slider in the status bar.
Why shouldn't the scaling factor be shown next to the scaling factor slider in
page preview?

Maybe a double-click on the scaling factor (number) should open the "Sheet" tab
in the "Format Page" dialog like double clicking on the zoom factor opens the
"Zoom & View Layout" dialog.